


Spark

by RurouniHime



Series: Spark [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity War spoilers, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Battle, Returning Home, Reunions, Steve Rogers Feels, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 11:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14543655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: There are no reinforcements in this universe that will make a difference now.But he gets up. He pulls himself to his feet because that’s what he’s always done.





	Spark

**Author's Note:**

> Yep, no doubt there will be three ficlets to follow Infinity Wars, like I did with the [Winter Soldier fic set](https://archiveofourown.org/series/149895), the [Age of Ultron fic set](https://archiveofourown.org/series/272053), and the [Civil War fic set](https://archiveofourown.org/series/578833). This is the first of them, though it's not really a ship fic and I don't know that it will be connected to whatever else comes out of my brain in the wake of IW. 
> 
> Anyway. I had to write this. Of course I did.

“…eve.” A hand touches his arm. _“Steve.”_

He comes awake—feels like waking, though his eyes burn with how long they’ve been open—and blinks up at James Rhodes. “Yeah.”

“The ship’s arrived.” 

The communique. From space. “Another daughter of Thanos.” His mind starts and stops in fits. Faulty loops.

Rhodes shakes his head. He looks ages older than he did a day ago and, a day ago, ages older than he did the day before that. “Rocket says she’s good. For a relative definition of ‘good.’”

 _We’ve come to pull the spine out through Thanos’s neck,_ she’d said before the comm fizzled out. On a better day, her voice would have crept along Steve’s spine like a spider. Still, her words quickened something lodged in the base of his brain, a ghost of excitement. Drive. Purpose, before the rest caught up again, and it was gone. 

It’s nothing but a dull thud now, her voice, that ghost, the slow and steady beat of a drum: If it’s the last thing he does, he will tear Thanos’s head from his shoulders. 

_And it will be the last thing you do._

“Who’s with her?”

“The comm went out before she said. But I get the feeling she’s not a big talker anyway.” Rhodes claps his arm and leaves his hand there. “Reinforcements, Steve.” There should be hope there, in Rhodey’s eyes. But there’s no hope anywhere. Just exhaustion. All Steve has heard for days is weeping, until the low hush of it bleeds into the atmosphere. The forest still smokes, and the land is ripped apart by dark furrows. For two days, they’ve collected the dead that have been left to them. All of Wakanda is mourning. Names Steve knew in passing, and names…

Ayo. God, _T’Challa,_ names he feels like blades inching down the back of his throat—

Names stinging the very air. Names he cannot speak, or even think. For these names, there are _no bodies._ There’s no one to bury, or to burn, to touch, to clean. To sit up with through the night or to consign to the earth. 

He can’t get enough air. He hasn’t been able to breathe in three days. “‘Reinforcements.’”

Rhodey’s eyes beg him: _Don’t. Please don’t._

He’d like to say he obeys out of conscience. But really, Steve’s just too broken to make the effort.

God, where is Sam? He knows. He knows where Sam is. But he didn’t see it, not like Bucky feathering away right in front of him, not like Wanda, and though Rhodes had searched the trees until he collapsed, though Steve himself had torn his hands and face for hours digging through the brush, looking, looking… there’s something inside that refuses to accept. Not until he sees the body. He never saw Buck’s body, decades ago, and Buck had come back.

But Nat wanders around like a bomb has exploded just beside her head; Shuri cries, constant and silent, bathed in electronic gold as her fingers fly through formulas; Bruce hasn’t spoken in two days, Thor is as rigid and frozen as the stone of his axe, and they’re not coming back. 

There are no reinforcements in this universe that will make a difference now.

But he gets up. He pulls himself to his feet because that’s what he’s always done.

The ship is a bright star touching down in the field. Bruce sways in Steve’s periphery, skin ashy and eyes bloodshot, watching the new arrival. It has definitely taken some damage, but still it has elegant lines. Gleaming arcs. Steve waits beside Rhodey, dirty hair whipping in the downdraft, to greet the pilot. To see what she knows, any edge at all, to look ahead—

To take revenge.

—to look forward— 

Blood for blood.

—to look _forward._ Because this is the way he gets through this, this is the way he—

Through this? Through it to _what??_

No. This _is_ the way he gets through this. The hatch opens, lowering with a hiss to reveal a woman with bottomless eyes and more metal to her than flesh, and behind her—

He runs.

He _runs._ So fast, faster than at the barrier, than in Bucharest, than that very first day in NYC, his lungs squeezing, his heart slamming up into his mouth, his vision clouding to sepia, right up the ramp at the man limping slowly down it, and there, _there,_ thin and trembling and in his arms—

Not dead.

“T…” He can’t breathe, can’t even say his name. “T…”

His knees give, and then Tony is holding him up.

Not dead. Not dead. “Oh, God—” Steve gasps, inhaling oil-smell and sweat, the tang of old blood, a gift, the most precious he could possibly receive at this moment, and suddenly he’s praying, from the very center of himself to a deity he’d thought had abandoned him. “Oh, _God.”_

Not dead. Not dust. He can’t thank anyone. He can’t even parse that there are thanks to be given. He’d known, at his core, he’d _known_ Tony was dead and now, with a snap, he isn’t. He isn’t.

Tony’s arms seize around him. He hears Tony’s name from afar, voices behind him taxed to their absolute limits. Tony turns his face into Steve’s shoulder. The embrace turns sharp, too tight, but air fills Steve’s lungs fully for the first time in two days, that oil and the grease, and for the barest instant, he’s _home,_ at the compound again, and there’s no smoke threading through his nostrils anymore and no bodies to dig out of the debris.

It cracks from him: “You’re alive.” Not dust. “You’re alive—” The last word sucks inward instead, turning his stomach. He fights against the gall. Tony trembles, clutching him so tightly it aches.

And Steve hears a new sound. An old one.

Tony is weeping into the filthy shoulder of his suit as though his heart has shattered. It tears through Steve’s last filmy wall with a vengeance, all the razor pain and horror of the past forty-eight hours ratcheting up his throat in great heaves.

“I lost him.” It’s barely Tony’s voice at all. “I lost him.”

Words Steve hasn’t been able to utter. He bites into the fabric of Tony’s jacket and howls it out between his teeth, feels Tony’s fingers claw into his shoulders. They shake like the earth is moving.

Footsteps. A body crashes into them, “Tony, _Tony—”_ and another, “Tones?” another, Bruce, Rhodey, Nat’s choking sobs tumbling free at last, and then Thor is there, too, his arms warm around them all. Everything smells like dirt and ash and smoke and life, and all Steve can do anymore is cry.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> I am crossing my fingers that we will not be robbed of a satisfying Steve-Tony reunion in the second movie. I seriously need that, whatever form it takes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Incoming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14701464) by [RurouniHime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime)




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